The PHP Classes site completed 18 years of age. Nowadays it is much more than it used to be when it started.

It started as a place where PHP developers could get recognition for their work but soon it will be also a place where developers can start learning how to create their own businesses based on software products they will develop.

Read this article to learn about the present and the future of PHP Classes now that it has reached its adult age.

New Categories for Modern PHP Packages

Automating Package Submission From GitHub Repositories

Discovery of New Packages from GitHub

IonCube and SourceGuardian Sponsor the PHP Innovation Award

Present and Future of PHP Classes

Software Product Business Creation Course and Free Mentoring

Search Engine Optimization of Package and Blog Article Pages

PHP Reference Articles on Important Topics

Conclusion

PHP Classes Reaching its Adult Age

The PHP Classes site completed 18 years of age on June 24. I have been so busy lately that I was not able to post the usual birthday note like in the prior years until now. That is because I have been working on important parallel projects that will take the site to a completely new level. Let me tell you more in the following sections.

Past Year Improvements

Before talking about the future, let me tell you more what happened in the past year.

New Categories for Modern PHP Packages

PHP developer practices have evolved over the years. Therefore some categories were created lately to make it easier to find packages that used those newer practices.

The categories that were created more recently are: Traits for package that provide traits, PHP 7 for packages that work only with PHP 7 or more recent versions, and PSR for packages that implement interfaces defined in the PHP Standards Recommendations documents.

Automating Package Submission From GitHub Repositories

Nowadays most developers are using GitHub to host their projects. The goal of PHP Classes is not to host software project development like GitHub, but rather to give projects greater visibility beyhond what GitHub and other sites may provide.

Thanks to the suggestions of several contributors, the submission process for packages to be imported from GitHub is now more automated. Now developers just need to enter the URL of a package in a GitHub repository and the site will automatically proceed importing the package files as if the developer has submitted the usual package submission forms manually.

Discovery of New Packages from GitHub

Many developers that have submitted packages imported from GitHub often have developed other nice packages that they did not import yet because they forgot.

Nowadays there is a background process that keeps scanning GitHub for repositories of PHP packages that were added by current PHP Classes package authors.

There is also an administration panel on which I can see what new repositories were added to GitHub. When I see nice packages being added there, I may tell the site to send an invitation for the author to import it to PHP Classes.

If the author accepts the invitation, he just need to click on a link and the whole import process is automated to the point that the author may not need to do anything else to import the package.

IonCube and SourceGuardian Sponsor the PHP Innovation Award

One of the things that motivate developers to participate in the Innovation Award is the possibility to earn nice prizes.

To make it more interesting, two well known vendors of useful PHP products were invited and accepted to join the long list of sponsors of the PHP Innovation Award: IonCube and SourceGuardian. Both companies develop PHP Encoder products that help PHP developers to sell PHP applications in a protected format, so they do not need to disclose the original PHP source code.

Present and Future of PHP Classes

Other plans are being worked on to help PHP developers to take advantage of the community resources.

Software Product Business Creation Course and Free Mentoring

As you may have read in past year article, I have been working on a course to teach software developers to teach how to create their own businesses selling software products that they will develop.

Many developers would like to work on the software projects they created, work any time they want, work from any place they want, and make plenty of money so they do not have to work for other companies.

The greatest challenge is that they do not know how to create businesses in a way that they will succeed. Therefore I decided to create a course that will be launched soon.

I already had planned to launch this course last year but recently I changed my plans a bit. First I decided to invite a business partner to split the work and bring in knowledge and experience on business fields that I did not have.

Therefore Rodrigo Vasconcelos has joined me on this project and together we will launch the course hopefully in the next two months if all goes according to the plan. This has been a great decision that I made and it will help make the course much better than I could do it all by myself.

Another change is that the course will no longer be specific to software products. We opened the focus to help people that want to create businesses that may or may not be based on software products because the methods that need to be applied to create a successful business are the same for any business field.

Another change is that we will start first with the Portuguese speaking market. That is because both Rodrigo and me are based on Brazil. Therefore it will be easier to establish partnerships that will help the course reach a much broader audience.

Later we will expand to the international market with a version of the course in English. We will work together with a native English speaker partner that will do a much better job and presenting the course than just us.

Finally, more than teaching how to create a business, we want to show real world cases of success of businesses created with methods that we teach. Therefore we started giving free mentoring to people that accepted to let us expose those business cases when they are launched.

This will help the course students to see exactly how to apply the business methods, thus making it easier for them to understand how they can apply those methods when they work creating their businesses.

If you are interested to also get free mentoring on creating your own business, just contact me so I can enroll you for upcoming free mentoring sessions. Those can be either for the Portuguese or English versions of the course.

Search Engine Optimization of Package and Blog Article Pages

One of the reasons why the business course creation launch was delayed is that I wanted to show myself creating and software product business from scratch. Therefore last October I decided to create a software product that will be a SEO tool, I mean a tool for helping customers to optimize their site pages to get more visitors from search engines.

The prototype of this tool is already being used to optimized many pages of packages of blog articles. With this the tool has been helping many packages to get much more new users than before.

Since the development of this tool was not coming fast enough, I also decided to invite another partner to split the work on this project too. In the case I invited Cesar Rodas a long time contributor and winner of the PHP Innovation Award of the Year for two years in a row.

Cesar accepted the invitation and I am very glad he joined me because he is a very competent PHP developer that will help me to develop the tool faster and with greater quality than I could possibly do it all by myself.

PHP Reference Articles on Important Topics

One thing that the SEO tool above allows is to create articles that can become reference articles on important topics. We have created several of those reference articles with the help of some of the site contributors and we will create more.

These reference articles will be used as success cases to demonstrate for the future customers that the SEO tool works wery well.

We are paying some developers to write some of the planned articles. If you are interested to be paid for reference articles, just contact me to learn about the opportunities.

Here is the list of some of the current reference articles that we have published so far:

Conclusion

The work on PHP Classes site will continue to make it a better resource for all PHP developers. If all goes will in the future it will provide more opportunities to help other developers to make more revenue from what they love to do most, software development. Keep watching this space for more news on these plans.